Maman

A Private Affair

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Maman’s Wedding Party, New York City, 1957

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MAMAN

A PRIVATE AFFAIR

It was one year ago today that Maman departed this earth to fly home in her sweet chariot to her Maker at the age of 91. The chronic long-drawn-out wasting illness had reached its acute conclusion. She had no more worldly cares and worries, so there is that. She isn’t suffering any longer from advanced dementia and the circumstances that allowed her husband to isolate her from her children completely for a decade or more. She isn’t worrying about me, whether I am alive or unwell or in danger now. She doesn’t miss me anymore. This is of some comfort.

I received a phone call telling me her husband and my stepsister had forbidden my presence at the funeral last June, and also at the gravesite entirely against her wishes, and if it were not for a true friend generously attending instead, I would have also been entirely absent from her burial on June 15^th at Fort Sam Houston Cemetery in San Antonio Texas.

To honor her Jahrzeit, the anniversary and her memory, I am returning to New York City and this photograph taken on Maman’s wedding day in 1957 at the apartment of Julian and Lillian Goldman on Park Avenue. The people in the photograph are from left to right: Oakley Rhinelander, Petrea Pedie Hoving Durand, Audrey Gordon Goldman, Chester March Goldman, and Harry Durand. The portrait is of Lillian Levy Goldman, my paternal grandmother of Sephardic provenance from the Maghreb.

The wedding party is dressed in black, if you notice. This is the only photo of the entire day. There are none of the service because it took place privately at The Carlyle Hotel. Not unlike the dreary marriage of Julia Flyte and Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited at The Savoy Hotel in London, with no one there to speak of, and the most important to the heart are absent. So, it was the news of her marriage in the NYT that caused my maternal grandfather to suffer a small stroke. While my grandmother supported her daughter in everything and was after all the source of the family fortune, she did not attend the wedding and she pulled no strings as to arranging a suitable location for the event, or any formal gathering.

 It has always been a conundrum how Julian Goldman my Jewish Grandfather had managed to get hold of this huge crumbling pre-war Park Avenue apartment on rent control, it was a mystery no one has ever solved. Remember that no Jews were permitted to reside on Park Avenue in any building as you could read in the by laws of any Co-Op board on the Upper East Side, and I daresay you wouldn’t even want to bother. No building’s board would concede residency to anyone with a Jewish surname or of Jewish provenance in the New York City of the 1950s and 60s and for decades beyond, no matter who you were and how much money you had.

When the Depression came the retail magnate had not seen it coming and had no more than $5000 in the vault. His four sons attended private prep schools and Ivy League schools on full scholarships, as he lost everything he had just about as his clothing store empire collapsed. Gone were the trips to Europe on Cunard, gone were the racehorses wearing the Goldman colors in Deauville, and gone were the days he was recognized by every doorman and Maître’D at every restaurant in the city. Gone were the days it had cost him nothing to pay off his first wife one million dollars to take her sons and leave, though they probably never divorced, and start a new life with my Grandmother Lillian.  She was of Sephardic provenance from Algiers, her maiden name was Levy. They went on to have a family of five children though Julian and Lillian were never legally married according to Jewish or Civil law.

My paternal grandfather accepted Maman wholeheartedly into his home where she would reside along with Mab Ashforth her sister-in-law having just married Bo Goldman who was barely out of Princeton. Mab may have even still been at Barnard at the time. It was my father who suggested Bo crash Mab’s debutante party at The Plaza Hotel to which he was not invited, by wearing a waiter’s coat and carrying a tray and ditching both once he was in. They danced all night and fell in love. Both brothers were poor then, though later my parents moved out to a house in Locust Valley on Long Island when my brother was born. Maman hated it out on the island, and they returned to the city to 799 Park Avenue across the street from her mother at 800 Park Avenue, and we rented the duplex penthouse since my father’s surname was Goldman and the rental building wasn’t too offended.

My father worked as a real estate agent at the firm of Douglas Elliman. He was ambitious and I have heard that Old Man Elliman as they called him was always cautioning my father not to go out on business on his own, that he needed structure. My father dreamed big, and while he had studied classics and political science at Amherst, graduating Magna Cum Laude on a Classics scholarship, he now aimed to be a New York City developer. Eventually, and not many years later he would realize his dream and build the building called The Bronx Park East, though he would also be indicted for embezzling Mitchell Lama funds by the time it went up.

Maman would not call herself courageous, and yet she rebelled against the prejudice of an authoritarian father, and the challenges her children would face in her world in New York society with Jewish surnames. While she could have married any one of the men who proposed to her, heirs to fortunes and captains of industry, she chose to marry my father who while brilliant and ambitious. like his brother Bo he was penniless. Both Mab and Maman stood by their husbands while they were starting out, and both brides had been ostracized by their families though Maman’s social life was not affected in the least, and she began investing in theater, including her brother-in-law’s Broadway production of The Importance of Being Ernest. Bo would go on to write Oscar winning movies and my father would own a historic house in Bermuda, a thriving cattle ranch in Colorado, a home in London, racehorses around the world in Rio de Janeiro and Baden-Baden, as well as he retrieved the black and white Goldman racing colors which his father had lost.

If the theme of my father’s life was restoration and getting back the way of life his father had lost, then Maman’s theme was balance which she was always trying to regain. She made a grave mistake from which she never recovered, marrying the man who became our stepfather, and so I will end with these fitting final words from the novel Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray and wish you, dear readers, an excellent evening.

“It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarreled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now.”

~The Luck of Barry Lyndon

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